David first started teaching in Grad school and during the last 7 years, he has been involved with mentoring high school and university students on mostly the NLP technology he helped develop. In November of 2025, David semi-retired, became an adjunct professor at a University, and continues his work on developing and promoting NLP++.
Student Teacher
While getting his master’s degree in Linguistics, David taught an undergraduate linguistics course at the Ohio State University in Columbus Ohio. He was a highly rated teacher and was sought after by PHD students as to what computer courses to take in the new area of computational linguistics (in the mid 1980s). David could have continued onto his PHD but decided to continue his research work as a full-time employee at Battelle Memorial Institute.
Teaching NLP in Brazil
In 1987, David quit his job, sold everything, and moved to Brazil – something he wanted to do since 1980. His reasoning was if he didn’t do it while he was still young, he would not have the chance later on.
While there, he landed a job via a University Professor Emmanuel Passos who taught at the Military Engineering Institute in Rio where David gave several talks to classes in NLP. David also gave a talk at a conference in Belem Brazil on the same subject.
David returned to the United States where he married his wife Doris and spent the next 30 years in the computer industry, mostly in AI and Natural Language Processing. During this time, he was not involved in teaching.
Mentorships
In 2015, David started working at LexisNexis Risk and there, in 2016 was moved to the HPCC Systems supercomputing group having demoed his NLP technology to one of the members of the group. While there, David started getting involved with mentoring students in robots, machine learning, and eventually, natural language processing.
The first students were students from the Robotics department at American Heritage High School involving projects related to their robotics program. The third project involved image recognition for a security robot prototype.
AI and Natural Language Processing
De Hilster proposed NLP projects in the following years as internship projects for the supercomputing group which became very popuplar, working with students from Stanford, Clemson University, University of Sao Paulo in Brazil, and RVCE University in India.
Here is a video of their projects.
During this time, David formed a stronger working relationship with two universities: Clemson University, and RVCE University in India and his work with universities became more involved.
First Masters Thesis Using NLP++
As part of a grant from LexisNexis Risk, de Hilster worked closely with master’s student Ashton Williamson on a project involving assigning codes to medical text using NLP++.
You can read a paper co-authored by David de Hilster and presented at the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) in 2024 based on Ashton’s master’s thesis as well as see a video presentation of his work. Here is a link to a paper published in the ACL: Low-resource ICD Coding of Hospital Discharge Summaries.
RVCE University Workshops
David has also given various workshops remotely to RVCE University in India. The workshops have included invited talks to the computer science department, to the RVCE Coding Club, and a workshop for Credit for computer science students.
David formed a formal relationship between the Natural Language Understanding Global Initiative and RVCE University. They plan to work together on teaching rule-based NLP in the fall of 2025 at the university in India which is located in Bangaluru.
Northeastern University
In January 2025, David was hired by Northeastern University at the new campus in Miami Florida as an adjunct professor teaching a database course to master’s students. David is to talk to startup companies about the possibility of using NLP++ in their software systems. David is part of the Multi-disciplinary Master’s Program in the school of Engineering (MGEN).
De Hilster has proposed two small NLP projects to work with students and is currently in talks with the University about doing a much larger project: NLP Blockchain.
Textbook
David is currently writing a Textbook entitled “Rule-Based NLP using NLP++” with NLP++ co-creator Amnon Meyers. They hope to finish the book in the summer of 2025 to be ready for RVCE university to teach in August 2025.
NLP Blockchain
In the fall of 2025, David will lead a team of industry experts and students in a class that will design an NLP blockchain.
